A Review Of The Effects Of Violent Video
Games On Children And Adolescents, Jodi L. Whitaker, Brad J. Bushman

Washington and Lee Law Review

Social Media, Public School Teachers, And The First Amendment, Mary-Rose Papandrea

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Education officials around the country are grappling with issues surrounding public school teachers’ use of social media. Typically concerned that social media makes it easier for teachers to engage in inappropriate communications with their students, officials have adopted guidelines that prohibit K-12 teachers from using social media to communicate with their students for noncurricular purposes. In addition, teachers are frequently punished for content they or others post on social media even when their students and the school community were not the intended audience. Current doctrine leaves unclear how much authority schools have to restrict their teachers’ use of social media ...

The Pros And Cons Of Online Dispute Resolution: An Assessment Of Cyber-Mediation Websites, Joseph W. Goodman

Duke Law & Technology Review

Due to increasing use of the Internet worldwide, the number of disputes arising from Internet commerce is on the rise. Numerous websites have been established to help resolve these Internet disputes, as well as to facilitate the resolution of disputes that occur offline. This iBrief examines and evaluates these websites. It argues that cyber-mediation is in its early stages of development and that it will likely become an increasingly effective mechanism for resolving disputes as technology advances.

Duke Law & Technology Review

Child pornography is an exception to First Amendment freedoms because it exploits and abuses our nation's youth. The latest trend in that industry is "virtual child" pornography. "Virtual child" pornography does not use real children or images of real identifiable children. When the object of desire is not a child, but merely a combination of millions of computer pixels crafted by a skilled artist, can the government ban this allegedly victimless creation?

Social Media, Political Change, And Human Rights, Sarah Joseph

Boston College International and Comparative Law Review

In this Essay, the role of social media in progressive political change is examined in the context of the Arab Spring uprisings. The concept of social media is explained, and Clay Shirky’s arguments for and Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments against the importance of social media in revolutions are analyzed. An account of the Arab Spring (to date) is then given, including the apparent role of social media. Evgeny Morozov’s arguments are then outlined, including his contentions that social media and the Internet can be tools of oppression rather than emancipation, and spreaders of hate and propaganda rather than ...

Virtual Child Pornography Laws And The Constraints Imposed By The First Amendment, Paula Bird

Barry Law Review

This article seeks to navigate through the complexities involved with the uncertain future of virtual child pornography laws. First, this article sets forth a brief history of the legislative actions and court rulings regarding unprotected speech and virtual child pornography, and discusses the current standing of child pornography laws. Entailed in this discussion will be a vigorous inspection of the current statutes and how they simultaneously affect law enforcement, prosecutors, and defendants. Finally, the potential future of laws regarding virtual child pornography is analyzed, including addressing the issues of how the application and interpretation of the laws are changing and ...

Breaching The Great Firewall: China’S Internet Censorship And The Quest For Freedom Of Expression In A Connected World, Christopher Stevenson

Boston College International and Comparative Law Review

In the final days of 2005, Microsoft Corporation made international headlines when it removed the site of a Beijing researcher from its blog hosting service. Soon, other instances of U.S. companies assisting in China’s internet censorship emerged. These revelations generated outrage among commentators and legislators and led to calls for action. This Note examines the methods of internet censorship employed by China and other nations, and explores the assistance that U.S. companies have provided to these nations. It analyzes the liability issues facing these companies in light of existing case law and statutory solutions proposed in the ...

Boston College Law Review

The rise of “Big Data” analytics in the private sector poses new challenges for privacy advocates. Through its reliance on existing data and predictive analysis to create detailed individual profiles, Big Data has exploded the scope of personally identifiable information (“PII”). It has also effectively marginalized regulatory schema by evading current privacy protections with its novel methodology. Furthermore, poor execution of Big Data methodology may create additional harms by rendering inaccurate profiles that nonetheless impact an individual’s life and livelihood. To respond to Big Data’s evolving practices, this Article examines several existing privacy regimes and explains why these ...

The Rise Of Computerized High Frequency Trading: Use And Controversy, Michael J. Mcgowan

Duke Law & Technology Review

Over the last decade, there has been a dramatic shift in how securities are traded in the capital markets. Utilizing supercomputers and complex algorithms that pick up on breaking news, company/stock/economic information and price and volume movements, many institutions now make trades in a matter of microseconds, through a practice known as high frequency trading. Today, high frequency traders have virtually phased out the "dinosaur" floor-traders and average investors of the past. With the recent attempted robbery of one of these high frequency trading platforms from Goldman Sachs this past summer, this "rise of the machines" has become ...

Criminalizing Revenge Porn, Danielle Keats Citron, Mary Anne Franks

Faculty Scholarship

Violations of sexual privacy, notably the non-consensual publication of sexually graphic images in violation of someone's trust, deserve criminal punishment. They deny subjects' ability to decide if and when they are sexually exposed to the public and undermine trust needed for intimate relationships. Then too they produce grave emotional and dignitary harms, exact steep financial costs, and increase the risks of physical assault. A narrowly and carefully crafted criminal statute can comport with the First Amendment. The criminalization of revenge porn is necessary to protect against devastating privacy invasions that chill self-expression and ruin lives.

Journal of Legislation

While information security and privacy losses are now spiraling out of control, and have been demonstrably shown to threaten national sovereignty, military superiority, industrial infrastructure order, national economic competitiveness, the solvency of major businesses, faith and trust in the Internet as a platform for modern commerce, as well as political stability, the U.S. Congress has nonetheless to date refused to seriously address the root cause of these threats. The root cause is a legally reinforced incentive system that encourages, and further entrenches, top management decisions that provide inadequate resources for, and inadequate top management attention to, information security and ...

Boston College Law Review

Telemedicine services, such as virtual consultations and remote patient monitoring, are revolutionizing health care delivery. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“ACA”) promotes the use of technology in health care reform as a means to increase quality and access while reducing costs. Despite the excitement around telemedicine, the lack of Medicare reimbursement hinders access and innovation. This Note analyzes the utilization of telemedicine to promote health care access for Medicare beneficiaries, and argues that legislative and regulatory changes are needed to reconcile current Medicare policies with the ACA’s encouragement of using telemedicine services. Specifically, this Note ...

Should Youtube’S Content Id Be Liable For Misrepresentation Under The Digital Millennium Copyright Act?, Laura Zapata-Kim

Boston College Law Review

YouTube has quickly become the dominant player in the Internet video sharing platform market. To keep its leading position, it created an internal automated system to police potential copyright infringements known as Content ID. Generally, that system functions similarly to third-party computer automated systems that send takedown requests, yet it is exempt from liability for removing lawful videos under a safe harbor provided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (“DMCA”). Although some industry experts first championed Content ID, many now question whether it unfairly favors copyright holders and YouTube itself at the expense of content creators and the ...

Corporate Privacy Failures Start At The Top, Victoria L. Schwartz

Boston College Law Review

With the rise of big data, numerous corporations are in the privacy business. Yet even corporations not directly in the privacy business must also make important decisions potentially impacting the privacy of their employees, consumers, and shareholders. A wide consensus of scholars and commentators has agreed that corporations fail to adequately protect privacy. The existing scholarship has largely focused on demand-side market failures to explain this privacy failure phenomenon. This Article offers a supply-side market distortion theory that reinforces the existing demand-side explanations to better account for corporate privacy failures. Under this supply-side theory, extensive corporate disclosure requirements, including the ...

University of Massachusetts Law Review

Commercial website publishers use false and misleading information to create distrust of vaccines by claiming vaccines are ineffective and contain contaminants that cause autism and other disorders. The misinformation has resulted in decreased childhood vaccination rates and imperiled the public by allowing resurgence of vaccine-preventable illnesses. This Article argues that tort liability attaches to publishers of commercial websites for foreseeable harm that results when websites dissuade parents from vaccinating their children in favor of purchasing alternative products offered for sale on the websites.

Introduction, Tracy Mitrano

Tracy Mitrano

Chapter Five: The San Bernardino Iphone Case, Tracy Mitrano

Tracy Mitrano

The San Bernardino iPhone case burst on the scene as I was nearing the completion of this manuscript. I could not have imagined a better scenario to sum up the issues of free speech, privacy, intellectual property and security than this case. Not least because the San Bernardino Apple iPhone case generated considerable public interest and policy debate in the United States and abroad. At stake are issues such as the balance between national security and personal privacy, tensions between global technology companies and domestic law enforcement, and the potential supremacy of technology -- particularly encryption -- over traditional notions of public ...

Chapter One: Free Speech, Tracy Mitrano

Tracy Mitrano

Chapter Two: Privacy, Tracy Mitrano

Tracy Mitrano

"Free speech" and "privacy" operate as integral, essential supporting values that underpin the missions of colleges and universities in the United States. Chapter One focused attention on free speech. Many of the same arguments could be made by and for privacy. It would be interesting to subject the same content about free speech to a global "find and replace" function for the applicable legal and policy points between them! Nonetheless, US law separates these two areas. Therefore, this chapter will focus on privacy law in particular: government surveillance and consumer privacy. Both subsets of privacy law, I will argue, have ...

Is Liability Just A Link Away? Trademark Dilution By Tarnishment Under The Federal Trademark Dilution Act Of 1995 And Hyperlinks On The World Wide Web, Martha Kelley

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

Privatization Of The Judiciary, Eldar Haber

Seattle University Law Review

The digital era invoked new challenges to judicial systems. The Internet enabled violation of privacy and intellectual property rights and enhanced the magnitude of criminal activity. Recognizing the inability of courts to handle a high magnitude of lawsuits, along with enforcement difficulties, policymakers worldwide chose to delegate quasi-judicial powers to online intermediaries that facilitate or enable such potential violations or infringements of rights. Search engines were first tasked to perform a quasi-judicial role under a notice-and-takedown regime to combat copyright infringement around the world. Recently, the European Union (EU) decided to delegate judicial authority to search engines by granting rights ...

A Brave New Borderless World: Standardization Would End Decades Of Inconsistency In Determining Proper Personal Jurisdiction In Cyberspace Cases, Jonathan Spencer Barnard

Seattle University Law Review

While various courts and numerous legal professionals have addressed the issue of inconsistent application of personal jurisdiction in cyberspace cases, the Supreme Court has yet to discuss the impact that technology might have on the analysis of personal jurisdiction; thus, many details remain unresolved. This Note examines the varying jurisdictional splits between the lower district courts, the courts of appeals, and the federal circuit court of appeals in determining the proper approach to take when dealing with Internet jurisdiction. After an examination of several key cases, this Note will explain why the Supreme Court, or the Legislature, should adopt an ...

Pornography As Pollution, John C. Nagle

John Copeland Nagle

Pornography is often compared to pollution. But little effort has been made to consider what it means to describe pornography as a pollution problem, even as many legal scholars have concluded that the law has failed to control internet pornography. Opponents of pornography maintain passionate convictions about how sexually-explicit materials harm both those who are exposed to them and the broader cultural environment. Viewers of pornography may generally hold less fervent beliefs, but champions of free speech and of a free internet object to anti-pornography regulations with strong convictions of their own. The challenge is how to address the widespread ...

The Georgia Open Records Law Electronic Signature Exception: The Intersection Of Privacy, Technology, And Open Records, Michael L. Van Cise

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

Internet Payment Blockades, Annemarie Bridy

Florida Law Review

Internet payment blockades are an attempt to enforce intellectual property rights by “following the money” that flows to online merchants who profit from piracy and counterfeiting. Where corporate copyright and trademark owners failed in the legislature and the judiciary to create binding public law requiring payment processors like MasterCard and Visa to act as intellectual property enforcers, “non-regulatory” intervention from the executive branch secured their cooperation as a matter of private ordering. The resulting voluntary best practices agreement prescribes a notice-and-termination protocol that extends the reach of U.S. intellectual property law into cyberspace, to merchants operating “foreign infringing sites ...